TAC setting science must change if discards are to become manageable
Last December, fisheries managers at the annual UK/Norway/EU trilateral negotiations set the total allowable catches (TACs) for 2024. When they did, they made the deliberate decision to diverge from the 2024 ICES Northern cod advice. Against the background of widespread increasing stock biomass, the ICES MSY-based assessment through a novel precautionary procedure would have cut the TAC by 17%. Instead, managers decided on an increase of 15%, and the North Sea fishing industry breathed a collective sigh of relief that it would not be facing the creation of another set of impossible working conditions.
Managers appreciated that had the advice been adopted, one of the practical consequences would have been large-scale discarding, or if applied under a full system of discard controls, economically ruinous tie-ups, together with significant lost yield due to underfishing a variety of intrinsically linked stocks. ICES’s own supplementary analysis of the implications of the single stock advice on catches of other stocks in the mixed demersal fishery predicted that 35 out of 43 of the North Sea fleets would have been choked. Managers wisely avoided that unpalatable scenario.
Narrow Rigid Design
The advice for Northern cod reflected a particularly acute case of dislocation between scientific advice and management decisions, but it is not a one-off. Protocols designed to attain maximum sustainable yield, whilst applying precaution under single stock assessments imply management incoherence over discards in several important fisheries. Insufficient attention paid to the implied consequences, not to mention balancing socio-economics and business stability, results in perverse outcomes. Yet this approach is by design a central feature of the current policy-science framework. It is especially stark when 0 TAC advice results. I would argue that to achieve better practical outcomes in the realities of mixed fisheries trade-offs, the format of that advice could and should change.
The extent to which discards are factored into ICES single stock assessment advice, and therefore the annual negotiations, is deliberately constrained. Norway, the UK and the EU approach those negotiations in slightly different ways but the concept of MSY ranges, enshrined in the EU multi-annual plans (MAPs) are influential in the advisory process. MSY ranges explicitly aim to provide a degree of flexibility over MSY but only a narrow one. They are constrained to allow for no more than a 5% reduction of yield when compared to MSY, whilst also ensuring there is less than a 5% probability of biomass falling below limit refence points. Such limits are essentially arbitrary but prioritise single-stock MSY. This is quite different to purposefully evaluating the trade-offs between MSY and precaution, along with implied discards or lost yield as a result of chokes across a complex of stocks.
An attempt to bridge this divide and evaluate the management trade-offs is provided by ICES in a separate supplementary mixed fisheries analysis that examines the implications of the single stock MSY advice for mixed fisheries by applying a range of scenarios that allow the identification of choke risks among complexes of stocks.
However, this supplementary advice has yet to command the profile of the single stock advice and attention to it varies across the contracting governments. Its production requires the completion of the single stock advice first so that it generally lands midway through the annual negotiations. Whereas the single stock advice gives a single headline TAC recommendation, the mixed fisheries analysis presents the results of the applied scenarios without giving a single recommendation. Managers may then interpret the results accordingly. On the other hand, a single headline advice number encourages the nailing of colours to masts.
Public Discourse Confusion
The mixed signals generated by the advisory process and the often-unrealistic single stock headline advice, which demands that managers diverge from it to correct for the “bigger picture”, results in an unnecessarily unhealthy public discourse on the state of our fisheries that harms the reputation of the industry.
ENGOs routinely use any divergence from single stock advice to accuse decision makers of pandering to industry short-termism to paint an environmental disaster narrative, persuade consumers to avoid particular stocks and sow confusion over the state of our fisheries to leverage ever more rigid controls. Blue Marine Foundation and Client Earth are presently respectively taking the UK government and EU Ministers to court over the matter, arguing that sustainability goals are not being met.
Fixing the System
So, what needs to change? The policy and the ICES science communities need to chart a way out of the present incoherence, but from EEFPO’s perspective, I would suggest the following:
- ICES should be given a strengthened mandate to provide advice with respect to managing discards. Current MoUs between the contracting countries and ICES lack this specificity.
- Chokes identified by the mixed fisheries analysis need to be related to suitable reference points in single stock advice to illuminate short-term trade-offs between discards, MSY and precaution, to guide management decisions clearly and justifiably on the basis of the available science.
- Single stock MSY should not be the sole yardstick of health applied across every stock. As any fisheries scientist will tell you, you can’t achieve single stock MSY across all stocks at the same time, yet we presently lack transparent systems for recognizing this or prioritizing certain stocks over others.
When selectivity measures can only go so far, and choke risk implies underfishing more commercially important stocks, there is a good case for minor commercial or bycatch stocks not to have the same level of priority. This is not to undermine the need to prevent a stock from becoming biologically impaired and collapsing, but in the face of the operational needs to best manage discards MSY needs a more holistic interpretation than presently applies.
A more balanced approach would try to maximise yield across a complex of mixed fishery stocks, recognising that, for some, greater flexibility over meeting single stock MSY is justified. This could be implemented through long-term management plans such as EU MAPs, UK FMPs or the multi-annual strategies process under the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA).
Adaptive or Crisis Management?
The format in which ICES advice is currently presented is not well designed to support fisheries managers to arrive at well-balanced decisions. Precaution, MSY and discards minimisation are important parameters for TAC decisions, but the advisory process is presently too narrowly aimed at the interpretation of single stock MSY and precaution at the expense of discards management. This amounts to an overly rigid straitjacket. It should be orientated more towards the careful evaluation of the trade-offs among conflicting management goals to facilitate adaptive fisheries management. This would afford fisheries science, a more useful and constructive way to support management decisions.
This question becomes more relevant each year as the consequences of following the EU /UK landing obligation materialise. A sub-optimal science/policy framework makes TAC decisions much harder work than it ought to be.